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Exclusive: Luke Thallon is in good company when it comes to playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Toby Stephens, Alex Jennings, David Tennant, and Paapa Essiedu are just a few of the actors who have taken on the melancholy royal for the RSC.

Ben Kingsley gave his Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon Upon Avon in 1975. When Richard Attenborough couldn’t decide who to cast to portray Mahatma Gandhi in his epic movie Gandhi, he remembered Kingsley’s interpretation of the Dane. The rest is Academy Award history.

Ben Kingsley in 1975 Royal Shakespeare Company production of ‘Hamlet’. Jay Cocks Studio Collection/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Now it’s Thallon’s turn.

He’s unknown outside of the theatre world. But within it, he’s celebrated and adored, because he can, seemingly effortlessly, take on any role from a young grabby and grubby Roman Abramovich in Peter Morgan’s play Patriots,...

Looks are deceiving with Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel from 1978. What appears to be a run-of-the-mill drama that will surely fall into the usual clichés of perseverance and eventual victory about a woman standing up to a small town of bullies that sees her as an outsider is actually much more complex. Rather than be about an ever-increasing contingent of allies coming out of the woodwork to rally around her as she sticks it to the haughty aristocrats up on the hill, this story focuses upon the unfortunate reality that money and power will almost always prevail. Instead of fantasizing about an old-fashioned conservative community’s wholesale ideological change, Fitzgerald and Coixet reveal how success happens one person at a time.

It’s the type of message that simultaneously inspires and frustrates in today’s climate of bullish partisans refusing to...

"You make me believe once more in things I thought forgotten..." Greenwich Entertainment has released an official Us trailer for this lovely book-lovers film The Bookshop, the latest feature from Catalan filmmaker Isabel Coixet. This had a major premiere at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, but it was rather poorly received, and hasn't been highly regarded by many critics unfortunately. The Bookshop stars Emily Mortimer as an independent woman living in England in 1959 who fights to keep a bookshop open and running in a small town that doesn't really seem to need one. The full supporting cast includes Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson, Hunter Tremayne, Honor Kneafsey, James Lance, and Reg Wilson. It's described as "an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community." This will probably connect most with die-hard book lovers. Here's the official Us trailer (+ poster) for...

We return with another edition of the Indie Spotlight, highlighting recent independent horror news sent our way. Today’s feature includes release details for Inbred, Blood, and 4 Dead Girls, a trailer for The Mole Man of Belmont Avenue, featuring Robert Englund, details on a Jason Voorhees-inspired charity, an interview with Nick Basile, the director of Dark, and much more:

The Mole Man of Belmont Avenue Trailer and Release Details: “Two years ago, the Mugg Brothers, who have never worked a day in their lives, inherited a brownstone apartment building. In that short time, their slacker ways have run the building into the ground. Tenants are moving out, no one drinks at the bar downstairs, and the building’s pets are going missing. If all that isn’t enough to make them sit up and take notice, they soon discover a mysterious creature is hiding in the basement and trying to...